Curiosity Killed the Cat
by LoveLaughDanceWrite
Summary: A story about feline-human hybrids, parallel to Maximum Ride but with different characters. Humor, romance, and major action! By the author of "Falling in Love and Other Complicated Things". Please R & R! :
1. I'm a Cat Person

**Author's Note: Well, inspiration ****sort of struck, so I'm making another FanFic! Yay! This one's going to be **_**parallel **_**to Maximum Ride, but it doesn't actually talk about Max, Fang, and the main Flock characters. Hope ya like it anyways!**

**For you people who started reading this because of **_**Falling in Love and Other Complicated Things**_**: NO WORRIES. If you like that story, I am still continuing it. In fact, I have more than 10 prewritten chapters I have not yet posted, so! For those of you who just happened to stumble upon this FanFic, check it out!**

**As always, reviews are really appreciated!**

**Oh, and a question: How would you guys feel about a Hunger Games FanFic? Ideas? Thoughts? **

**Well, that was a superlong author's note, so…**

**Disclaimer: I do not own Maximum Ride, even though I am not technically writing about Maximum Ride, it is still more-or-less the same scenario. **

Well, you know what they say: Curiosity killed the cat.

That's what I got for poking my nose into places it didn't belong.

The whitecoat chuckled behind me. It was a deep, ugly sound, and for a minute I felt compelled to attack his ugly face. Hadn't he messed up my life enough as it was? Did he have to purposely antagonize me?

But I'd fallen for his trap. So I guess he was almost justified. _Almost_.

I was grabbed roughly from behind, steered back to my crate, flanked by Erasers. They might be a nightmare to any normal human, and they might be a living nightmare to any other experiment. But to me, they were a thousand times worse than that. Canines and felines are natural enemies, you know?

You lost yet? 'Cause I sure know I am. Ha ha. I'm funny.

But seriously, let me explain.

You've probably heard of Maximum Ride. She and her Flock—they're the best-known experiments, especially around here. The Flock are raptor-human hybrids. Me and my peeps? We're _cat_-human hybrids.

There's four of us, and we're more-or-less the same age, which is around fourteen. We—well, I'll start with myself. I have curly black hair which has never been cut (I live in a freaking _dog _crate, and yes, I get the irony, what with me being part cat) but stays roughly the same length. It's a cat thing. If you choose to look really closely, you will see two tabby ears poking up through that hair. Two _cat _ears.

I have gray eyes that look normal by daylight, but that reflect light in the dark. Like a cat's.

I'm not super tall or super short, either. I'm about average, but my frame is lean with tightly coiled muscle. My legs, especially, seem to be always ready for action. Action that never comes.

My fingernails extend into retractable claws, when I want them too.

Oh, and the tail. Of course.

I'm part tabby, a dark tortoiseshell tabby, and my long, fluffy tail—which I'm rather proud of—helps me keep my balance, like, when I run and climb trees and stuff.

Yeah.

Like I said, there's four of us. Me—Tess—Hash, who has an unruly mess of brown hair and dark tabby ears and tail, Cleo, who's blonde, but for some reason has black ears and tail, and Levi, who's a solid dark brown. I'm the mouthy one, Cleo's the pretty one, Levi's the mischievous one, and Hash is the… well, the normal one.

You don't even know how much it pains me to admit that.

Anyways. Back to the present.

I was forced roughly into my cage, passing rows of others. Cleo was, as always, looking chique in her tattered hand-me-down lab clothes, her light, fluffy blonde hair nearly covering her ears. She tried to give me a smile as I passed, but cowered in sight of the Erasers. Hash raised his eyebrows in a way that's always pissed me off—slightly sarcastic, slightly questioning, and slightly holier-than-thou. And yet reassuring all the same. Levi was asleep in his crate, drooling slightly on his worn hoodie. It almost made me smile.

Almost.

The crate door latched behind me, the click having a sound of finality to it. I wouldn't get to leave the cage, not unless someone decided to run any more sick experiments on me. And for the day, I was completely tuckered out. I'd been resisting physically and mentally for the past five hours, give or take. I'd like nothing better than to curl up into a ball, my tail brushing against my nose, and take a catnap. So to speak.

I half-closed my eyes, looking around at the lab room. There was the four of us, of course. As far as I could tell, we were the only completely successful—and by successful I mean with an un-suffering human IQ—experiments. There were some that were complete abominations. For example, the human-squid mixture. They'd made several of those before they realized that it wasn't that great of an idea.

Oh, and the Firenzes. A Firenze is a—shudder—completely terrible creature, a mutation so wrong and horrifying and crazy that it could just possibly be successful. A human-_fire_ hybrid. Its skin is cracked and black, like Lava-Girl. (How do I even know about Lava-Girl? *Shrug*) It—the skin—is always lightly glowing, like an ember in the flame. When it wants to, though, a Firenze can always burst into flame, throw fireballs, the whole freaking spiel.

They're considering letting them loose, like Erasers.

And they're considering making a human-water combo. Ha-ha. (I'm a cat, remember?)

How do I know this? Well, I've got cat ears, which are vastly superior to raptor ears or whatever other ears you may have heard of, maybe short of dog ears. _Maybe_.

My eyes wandered over to Hash and stayed there, even though I willed them to move on. Hash. I've been thinking about him _way _too much lately. Well, it's not like he's bad-looking, even though he's not _technically _super good-looking either. And it's not like I'm not a teenage girl with raging hormones. I've known Hash for, like, ever. I've known our whole kindle (that's apparently what you call a group of kittens, which is what we technically are, being human kids with cat characteristics. You call a group of full-grown cats a _clowder_, though, and I am definitely _not _looking forward to that! Just another thing my sonar supercat ears picked up) since I was old enough to remember. It's not like we're best friends or brother-sister or anything. I mean, we live in the lab. Doesn't really present you with bonding opportunities, other than the mutual hatred of evil whitecoats. But.

I'm not the kind of girl to have a crush and get all giggly. In fact, I'm not the crush-y kind of girl at all. You'd think Cleo's more that type, with her ability to look supercute in, like, _any_thing—even the tattered clothes they give us. But no. It was me looking at Hash at that moment.

Anyways.

Suddenly, the door opened, flooding the night-darkened room with light. My brain fired off panic signals. Light in the middle of the night meant one of two things: An experiment had died, and they were taking care of it, or someone was slated for extermination.

Extermination: Death by Eraser. In the dark. Alone. Most likely outside. Always painful.

From my position on the floor (the heavier, bulkier experiments get crates on the floor, the smaller, animal-animal—as opposed to human-animal—experiments get crates on top) I saw a whitecoat's black dress shoes slowly pace the floor. His knee-length white coat billowed behind him, just in my line of sight. He paced closer.

My heart pounded. What if they exterminated _me_? What if he picked _me_? What if worst came to worst and our story had to be told from _Hash's point of view_?

The horror.

No, but seriously, I was terrified. There are thousands of better deaths than death by Eraser. Such as? I don't know. Heart attack in bed, surrounded by your loved ones? Freezing to death? A bullet to the head? Death by Eraser is definitely not a death I'd ever dream about.

Not that, you know, I'm such a nutcase that I dream about _death_. But sometimes it seems like the easier choice.

The dress shoes came to a stop in front of my crate. I saw three pairs of wide cat eyes, reflecting the light, looking at me. I was praying to every deity I'd ever heard a whitecoat mention that he wasn't going to pick me.

His knees bent.

I sucked in my breath. The room seemed to drop, like, twenty degrees, even though with the Firenzes, it wasn't ever really cold.

The whitecoat dropped into a crouch in front of my crate. I swear, I stopped breathing, my heart stopped beating, my hair prickled on my head, and my tail did that struck-by-lightning thing cats always do when they're scared.

_Maybe, _some random part of my brain thought, _I'll die of fear before they even get me to the Erasers. _

The whitecoat was now peering into my crate. He had thinning dark hair, black eyes, thick eyebrows drawn in concern. I couldn't quite make it out, but I thought maybe he was of Mexican descent. Then again, I thought I was going to _die_. I wasn't thinking about the whitecoat's _heritage _at the moment!

"Hey there," the whitecoat said, in a sort of tone you would talk to a child or a pet in, "Don't be scared!"

Don't be scared? _Don't be scared? _Was he out of his _freaking _(to put it mildly) _mind_!

I moved into the most inaccessible corner of my crate, showing that I clearly _was _very scared.

"I'm going to get you guys out of here," the whitecoat continued softly.

Now I recognized him. Everybody called him Sanchez, though I'm not sure what his first name was. He treated us the best, but he still didn't have any qualms about putting us through scarring ordeals. But that was because he was the leader of our Experiment.

How did I know this?

Well, if the scientists had wanted to keep any of this secret, they wouldn't have fitted me with freaking _cat ears_.

Knowing that he was the head of my Experiment didn't do anything for my fearing-for-my-life terror. If it was possible, in fact, the knowledge _increased _it.

Anyways, I managed to choke out, "Why?"

"Because you are too special to be in a cage. This is not the right place to develop your full potential. You are one of very few successful experiments! And because I care for you. I have watched you grow up. I hate seeing you go through all of these painful experiments."

Right. So now you're putting us through another one?

"Just me? I'm not going without my friends," I said forcefully. I wasn't _as_ scared now. I knew what was going on, and I could put a stop to it. Unless, you know, it was part of the plan for me to know what was going on and they knew that I knew and they wanted to see how I handled it. Or…

Yeah, well, chew on that. It's confusing. I'll explain later.

I swear, the whitecoat chuckled. "No, all four of you. I feel the same towards the rest of you, too. Almost like I'm your father."

I gritted my teeth. Something bad was happening: I was starting to…almost…trust him. I'd seen him be gentle to us, I'd seen him try to put a stop to the experiments before we were almost unconscious with exertion, I'd seen him sneak us extra food we weren't supposed to have. And… You know how cats can kind of pick up on people's emotions? I could _feel _his sincerity.

Before I go on: Each of us has a different cat "power". I have feline empathy (the emotion thing), Hash can run way faster than a cheetah when he wants to, Levi has cat-like stealth (and, since he's the troublemaker, that's not always the best thing!), Cleo has feline poise and grace and the ability to charm almost anything out of anyone. Even a whitecoat.

So. Back to your regularly scheduled experimentation.

Sanchez unlatched my crate and let me climb out. It was a new experience, being out of my crate without at least a pair of Erasers and maybe a Firenze guarding me. Before the whitecoat could, like, change his mind or something, I popped Cleo, Levi, and Hash's latches too.

"Okay, now, we've got to be real quiet so they don't catch us. What I'm doing is kind of against regulations," Sanchez said. I exchanged glances with Hash. Yeah, right. _We _know _this is part of the Experiment. But maybe we should keep on pretending we don't. _

Cats also have an ability to communicate using subtle body language. We can almost understand each other _to the syllable _without actually opening our mouths. Or reading minds. Or using any pre-determined signals.

He snuck us through several fire doors and out into the parking lot. _Weird. This place has a parking lot? _I interpreted Levi to be saying. That's a typical Levi thought for ya!

The whitecoat led us to a red convertible car. And I knew there was no going back now.

The Experiment had begun.

**Do you love it or do you LOVE it? How to tell me this? There's that little itty button right down there, but…**

**PRESS THE FREAKING BUTTON!**

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	2. Tess, We Ain't in the Lab No More

**Author's Note: Yo yo! ****You know, I'm feeling a little unloved today, which might impair my posting… What's that you say? You want to make it up to me? No, no, I couldn't ask you to do that… No… Well, if you insist… There is ONE way to show me your undying devotion to my amazing FanFics… That pretty little review button, you know…? **

**:P**

**Disclaimer: Next time I wish upon a star, I'll wish for the legal rights to Maximum Ride. But as of right now, I do not own any of the Maximum Ride characters or scenarios. However, MY characters and MY scenarios are…wait for it… MINE!**

We stared at the car in a moment of extreme tension.

To recap: 4 human kittens, 1 whitecoat, 1 lab, and 1 red sports car. Stolen from the lab, blah blah blah, et cetera et cetera.

And then the tension was broken by Levi, who whisper-screamed, "I call shotgun!"

How he knows that the front seat is called shot gun, I have no clue. No offense to his intelligence or anything, but we were raised in freaking _dog crates_. And we're part _cat_.

Then again, somehow, I also knew that it was called shotgun, so…

Sanchez laughed, and suddenly froze. Levi had bounced off the side of the car and jumped over the it and into the shotgun seat. Yeah, _oh_. He quickly composed himself, though, and invited the rest of us into the back seat. I slid in between Hash and Cleo. The whitecoat started the car and turned around to face us.

"My name is Julio Sanchez. It's spelled with a J, but you say it "Hulio". Most people call me Sanchez, though, and you can call me whatever you want. I'm taking you to a safe house I have prepared for you. It is well hidden, especially from Erasers."

He's saving us. "Saving". It's still part of the Experiment. I exchanged looks with Cleo and Hash. We all knew what was going to happen.

He's going to teach us to defend ourselves, disappear, and a year later the Erasers or Firenzes will come,Hash signaled. I could feel his sarcasm, his tiredness at all of it.

An explanation is long overdue, so:

I'm going to use the Flock kids as an example. Their savior was Jeb. Jeb taught them martial arts. When they were ready, he disappeared so that he could monitor them. Once they seemed like they could take care of themselves, the Erasers came back for the testing.

The Flock's testing was over, but they were still part of the Experiment. Hey, why not? Fix wings on a girl, train her, disappear, then tell her that her mission in life is to save the world and see how she reacts. It'll get you first place in the Science Fair and a sadistic pleasure in watching the subjects suffer.

Plus, there was still the confusing factor to figure out: Do they know that we know? Are we _supposed _to know? Because if we're supposed to know, well, we know and we'll run away and they'll track us somehow. And if they don't know that we know, we'll run away, they'll be surprised at first, but they'll track us anyways. There's no choice for _us_, really.

I was so, so tired, though. It didn't really matter in that moment, I decided. _He could be going soft. He could really be nice. He'll take us to the safe house and teach us and cook us good food, _I thought to myself, my head sliding tiredly onto Hash's shoulder. We can hope—for now—can't we?

~~~The Next Day~~~

I yawned and stretched out on the gray loveseat. Yesterday, we'd come into this long, low house and collapsed on the first thing we could find. Levi was sprawled out on the couch, Cleo was curled up in an armchair, and Hash was sleeping on a sheepskin rug.

The house, like I said, was long and low. There was only one level, plus a basement. The basic layout was this: A long hallway going down the whole length with rooms on either side. The roof was flat on top, without a ladder but (I'd noted) with many fun ways for a cat to climb up on. The basement had Sanchez's room, study, bathroom, whatever.

Some super mouth-watery smell wafted from the kitchen, and I dimly recognized it as bacon and eggs. I wasn't the only one, apparently; Hash stirred on his rug and Cleo shot me a smile from her armchair.

Sanchez poked his head out the window-thing (I don't know what it's called!) from the kitchen to the living room. (The living room, which was at one end of the house, connected openly into the kitchen. The other rooms either had doors and then the hallway or the hallway cut through them. Either way, it's still a pretty sweet house.) "All you can eat eggs, scrambled, fried, and over easy," he announced, "plus bacon, ham, mushrooms, peppers, and onions made to order!"

I had no idea what half of those foods were, but man, they sounded _good_!

In the end, the three of us had to all shake Levi awake at the same time for him to move. Levi definitely gets the Biggest Sleeper award in our crowd! We ate all we could, like Sanchez had offered, then went to tour the rest of the house.

Man, it was a _neat _house! A game room, a library stocked with books, the kitchen and living room, four rooms for us, two bathrooms, a study, and this thing Sanchez called a "hang room" that was almost like a second living room, but for us.

It was probably wired. But what heck.

I don't know if cats can actually see infrared, but we can. There didn't _seem _to be any cameras, but that didn't mean there actually _weren't _any.

There were four rooms for us, other than Sanchez's rooms in the basement: A black one, a dark green, a dark blue, and a dark purple. Cleo got the purple one by default, Levi got the blue one, Hash wound up in the green one and I got stuck in the black one. Whatever.

And then we went shopping. Shopping, glorious shopping! I love shopping. Shopping shopping shopping! All of you teenagers out there reading this are probably like, "Uh-huh, yeeeaaah." But I can bet my tail that you haven't grown up in a dog crate with nothing but the clothes on your back. When you don't have _anything,_ being able to walk into a store and tell an apparently multi-gajillionaire like Sanchez that you _want _this or that, and actually _getting _what you want… It's just amazing.

Each of us wound up with a laptop and an iPod of our choice, except for Cleo, who just got it in one package: the iPad. In purple. She would. Then Cleo and I rampaged the stores in search of cute clothes and cute shoes and (most importantly of all) cute hats. You know, to cover our ears. Levi and Hash weren't so into this part of our mall trip, but chose jeans and cargo pants and baseball caps of their own.

And then, get this—we went to the freaking _hair salon_! Like I said, my curly black hair stays roughly at the same length—about down to my waist—if I don't cut it, which I never really had. Same with Cleo's bleach-blonde hair. Hash's and Levi's would be about down to their chins, if it had been clean and straight.

My hair stylist's eyes widened when she massaged shampoo into my scalp, around my ears, but I saw Sanchez slipping her a little something after she'd given me copper streaks, hacked off about a foot of and layered my hair, and cut thin side bangs on my right side.

They'd left Levi's hair long in the back, but cut it a little shorter on the sides so that it was in an actual style (bet he loved that!). Hash's hair had been cut so that it wasn't short or long, just in between, almost covering his ears. And Cleo's hair had been fluffed up and cut so it was just past her shoulders, and she'd been given bangs. She looked, as always, amazing.

We went home, ate our fill, blah blah blah. But if you thought that I'd been calm for a moment, that any of us hadn't been tense and paranoid, that we didn't think it was too good to be true…

…Think again.

**There's that little blue "Review" button RIGHT THERE… I wonder what happens if you press it? And leave a review? Curiosity killed the cat, I know, but I promise nothing will happen if you REVIEW! :)**


	3. Cat Chat

**Author's Note: Please review, people! Seriously! I WILL NOT WRITE IF YOU DO NOT REVIEW! I also need ideas, and if you do not give me ideas, and I do not have ideas, well... THERE ARE NO IDEAS! So: REVIEW!  
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**Disclaimer: Sanchez, Tess, Levi, ****Hash, and Cleo? So mine. Max, Fang, Nudge, Gazzy, Angel, Iggy, and Jeb? JPs, unfortunately.**

If you know anything about cats, you know that they basically do whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want. Ding ding ding, that's us!

This rule also applies to sleeping habits. We sleep when we want to. We don't _get _tired.

So that pretty much explains what we were doing at three o'clock in the freaking morning, with our laptops and iPods, in our various rooms, IM-ing.

Also, cats catch onto stuff pretty quickly. Which would explain how we knew that the network was safe. It wasn't actually _our _network—Hash had piggybacked onto some bank's network, three thousand miles away. And once he'd gotten it, the rest of us figured it out pretty quickly too.

Levi, with his ghost-cat-like prowess, had gone into Sanchez's private basement rooms to make sure that he was _really _asleep. Then he'd IM-ed—

SANCES ASLIP.

Since we'd grown up in a lab, with no convenient spelling lessons, and since IM doesn't generally have spell check, well—this is what we got. But cats are, like, geniuses. So after about half an hour of trail-and-error learning, we became somewhat coherent. I'm going to edit out all of the pathetic spelling and typing mistakes we'd made, so that you can actually read it.

LEVI (JEANSBOY727): SANCHEZ IS ASLEEP.

**Hash**** (NotAPotato): Good. So. We basically know that this is part of the experiment. And that I'm a genius. Since I hooked us up to the bank thingy. ya. **

Tess (Experiment16) [Me!]: 1st of all, hash, u are not a genius since you can't even spell right. which is why i am telling the story, for the gajillionth time. 2nd of all, ya, we know its part of the experiment. anything else?

**Hash: you can't spell either, so ****don't be so high and mighty. **

**Hash: And i would be so much better at telling the story.**

_Cleo (KittyKat): Levi, I dig ur __screen name. Jeans, Levi… Hash, Not a Potato, ha-ha. Tess…Ouch. _

Tess: Yeah, I was trying to be funny. and hash, you would NOT be better at telling the story then me.

[I'm going to go a little off topic here to point out that Cleo and I had already almost-mastered typing, while I could bet that the guys were keying with one finger.]

LEVI: OK, SO WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO FIGURE OUT?

_Cleo: Anything. Why we were __stolen from the lab. Who Sanchez really is. What is going to happen next. What we're going to do. _

**Hash: 1- We were stolen from the lab for the Experiment. you know,**** so they can test our ability to live normally? 2- Sanchez is really a whitecoat who is pretending to be good so he can be part of the experiment. 3- I think they're going to teach us to defend ourselves and stuff, then see how we do. Like in all the other cases we heard about. 4-I think we should learn all we can and then scram.**

Tess: Yeah, but see, what if they EXPECT us to know what is going on and running away is part of their plan?

Tess: It's all so confusing.

LEVI: I THINK YOU ARE OVER-THINKING IT, TESS. AS LONG AS THERE'S GOOD FOOD AND NO DOG CRATES, I'M GOOD.

_Cleo: Yeah, but where do we "scram" to?_

**Hash: Anywhere. **

Tess: Whether it's part of the plan or not, they'll look for us. They're not going to want their story blown open, and they're going to want to sadistically run more tests on us.

**Hash: Fun.**

Tess: I know, right?

_Cleo: So what DO we do? _

LEVI: GET FOOD. I'M STARVING!

LEVI: YOU THINK I CAN DO IT?

LEVI: NEVER MIND, I KNOW I CAN. ANYONE WANT ANYTHING?

**Hash: ****Sandwich? **

LEVI: NO PROB. ANYONE ELSE?

Tess: Hey, guys! Not right now, okay? Right now we're having a serious discussion that may or may not affect the rest of our lives, however short they may be!

**Hash: You are so poetic. Jeez.**

**Hash: And we have to fuel our brains if we're going to make the correct decision here!**

Tess: That's why they call me the Mouthy one.

Tess: And we're not making any decisions right now, since all you're thinking about is FOOD!

Tess: !

**Hash: Ha-ha, forgot an exclamation point? **

Tess: :P

Tess: That's a sticking-out-my-tongue face.

[At this point, I think Levi gave Hash his sandwich.]

**Hash: Thanks, Lev****. **

LEVI: NO PROB-LEM-O. IT WAS EASY. WHAT CAN I SAY? I HAVE A GIFT!

_Cleo: Rolling. Eyes. _

Tess: Tell me about it.

Yeah, well, I'm not going to force you through the completely unrelated-to-the-situation conversation that followed. We generally tease each other endlessly, and this is just one of those examples. It's also the reason we didn't get up until, like, three the next day!

**Well…?**

**You know what to do!**** And in case you don't: **

**PRESS.**

**THAT.**

**BUTTON!**

**!**


	4. IMPORTANT NOTE

Note to the Readers:  
>Hey guys, I m so so SO sorry, but my usb, which had ALL of my unposted chapters (that s right-no back up, no file saved anywhere else) just randomly DIED. It won t work, it can t transfer files So for NOW I am terminating this series. My dad is going to try to take it to this guy to rewire it and see if I can get the files off, but, until then-or until I get the heart to try to rewrite everything-this series will be discontinued. I am super sorry, but please realize-I am just as heartbroken, if not more, as you guys. If you have any suggestions, please leave a review!<p>Thanks for your support! ~LLDW<p>

PS. Isn t this a funny bit of irony? I threaten not to post if you don t review and then I can t post? I swear, this is not a scam, you guys did a great job of reviewing. I am so sorry and I ll try to start posting again ASAP! 


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